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Author Here: Just wanted to share some technical details. The code can be found here https://github.com/valentinvieriu/stylegan2 https://github.com/valentinvier

Author Here: Just wanted to share some technical details. The code can be found here https://github.com/valentinvieriu/stylegan2 https://github.com/valentinvieriu/stylegan2 The main code and modification were put together by https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan2 https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan2. I've started with the pretrained ffhq model, and I've trained it using come hand picked 1000 images of cubist Wikiart paintings. The frontend is Vuejs and it's using the amazing https://github.com/Akryum/vue-virtual-scroller https://github.com/Akryum/vue-virtual-scroller for the very fast infinite scroll option. The app runs on Cloudflare Workers, using https://github.com/l5x/vue-ssr-cloudflare-workers-template https://github.com/l5x/vue-ssr-cloudflare-workers-template Hope you guys enjoy the experience and would love to get some constructive feedback

Rochus 7y ago
Great idea. Looks very convincing and aesthetic to me, but I am not an art expert. But I do know a lot about music and I am not yet convinced of the current offers of AI in this regard. So it would be very interesting to know how art experts react to these paintings.
- valentinvieriu 7y ago
  The challenge is that the Latent Space ( the space of all the art pieces of this model ) is so HUGE ( technically is infinite ) that there could be masterpieces sitting there undiscovered. I was aiming to create an interface to allow for crowd sourcing this process of finding those masterpieces. Hope the ui and and easy to pick some favorite process will help
  - pookeh 7y ago
    Or... train AI to pick out the masterpieces...and loop.
    - joncrane 7y ago
      Well people have to create the training dataset so we're on that path, should the author choose to continue on it.
    - valentinvieriu 7y ago
      Yep. Please click on the favorite button :) so I can keep the favorites
- tkgally 7y ago
  I'm not an art expert or an artist, but I spent a lot of time in art galleries and museums forty years ago looking closely at and thinking about abstract art. Some of the pieces here strike me as remarkably good and interesting to look at. If they had been implemented in oils rather than pixels, they would not seem out of place on museum walls.
  - valentinvieriu 7y ago
    That would be the next step to close the circle https://twitter.com/sougwen/status/1218672595350032385/photo/2 https://twitter.com/sougwen/status/1218672595350032385/photo...
adzm 7y ago
Hey this is an awesome project with really cool results. I think it can be grouped with "found art" conceptually. Several of the generated pieces are really quite interesting, though at some point the styles seem a bit repetitive, though I imagine that's simply due to training on cubism.
yantrams 7y ago
Very cool. Some of the results reminded me of Max Ernst’s frottage works and futurist compositions. If you are interested in exploring this with other curated collections, reach out to me. I have a MOMA collection of about 10k images.
- valentinvieriu 7y ago
  Would really appreciate it! Please connect with me on twitter @valentinvieriu
rfeague 7y ago
I think you have an opportunity here --- I found myself wondering how much it would cost to get a nice-quality print on canvas or metal. Something I could hang in my office. They look that good. Are they (or could they be) generated in sufficiently high resolution for a large format print?
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  Working in an office decorated by a bot is the most demoralizing experience I could imagine. I would probably go into an existential rage and start breaking things until someone more physically powerful came and subdued me.
  - thomasahle 7y ago
    Sure, once those things are common place it'll be dystopian; but for now it's just a fun conversation starter.
  - bobly_today 7y ago
    Such as a security bot?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - willvarfar 7y ago
    Is your problem that you know its bot-generated, or that you think there's some flaw in the pictures? What if you didn't know that the painting was the work of a bot? What if it was just some abstract painting that someone took enough fancy to to pay to have put on a canvas? Personally, I couldn't really tell them from the human-generated wikiart pictures that seeded the algorithm. Those human-generated pieces didn't speak to me either. I'd love to see the algorithm work on some other art style seeds.
    - jsaldes 7y ago
Jupe 7y ago
Fascinating stuff. Who decides what gets shared? Are you posting everything, or do you curate the results of the algorithm?
kernelsanderz 7y ago
Really great project. I'm interested in how you've implemented the back-end? How did you productionize the GAN model? Or did you just pregenerate 1000 images? (ie. are the images generated on-demand?)
- valentinvieriu 7y ago
  So the backend is simple, i've chosen to pregenerate 1 mil images at the beginning so it gives you some idea of diversity. I"ve tried to generate them realtime, but my server would have not survived the hackernews popularity today. The gan model is created by me, see in the comments above. I'm planning on bringing up new images on a daily timeframe, keep the one that people choose as favorites and delete the ones that were not popular
dimitry12 7y ago
I would love to see TensorBoard learning curves from your experiment: score/real and score/fake. I've tried fine-tuning FFHQ-model before and training was not progressing as I expected it to.
iandanforth 7y ago
Do neural painter next! https://github.com/reiinakano/neural-painters-pytorch https://github.com/reiinakano/neural-painters-pytorch
- valentinvieriu 7y ago
  Interesting idea. I will give it a try to see what is the output. I was looking for something in this direction to make the brush feel more appealing. Thank you
willvarfar 7y ago
Why cubist? Is it that that's the style of art you like? Or that you found to work best? It would be really interesting to see the kind of images generated when its trained with other styles.
- valentinvieriu 7y ago
  I have other styles too, and I'm planning on exchanging the AI on a regular basis. This was the one that I've personally liked the most. It was also the one that required the least training. I only have a 2080ti, and those models are quite hard to train. If you have recognisable shapes ore faces, you can quickly create some very disgusting art pieces that will make people sick. At this moment abstract seems to be the best solution.
joantune 7y ago
This is awesome! I would hook this up with Shopify and one of those printing and shipping services and see where that leads you. I'm a Shopify expert, already did that for customers, if you need advice let me know
gwd 7y ago
What I think would be interesting would be to add a human discriminator test: Can you tell genuine cubist art from computer-generated cubist art?
- tartoran 7y ago
  What would the point of that be may I ask? Something to do with a Turing like test? Lets not forget that the would be cubist model is actually fed tons of cubist images and all it does is regurgitating that back. Art done by people is somewhat similar but it does take place in a context that which AI could not yet understand.
  - gwd 7y ago
    Well, I'm personally curious. When I looked through this thread several hours ago, there seemed to be two very distinct camps: "This is really cool you should see if you can sell these", and "This is just random stuff mashed together; there's clearly no artistic intent". The first group, it seems, sees no "artistic intent" in real cubist art, and so sees no difference; the second claims to be able to see real "artistic intent" in real art, and to note its absence here. I have to admit I'm rather in the first camp. I have spent time in art galleries, but not a huge amount; I have opinions about art, but 90% of what I hear said about paintings seems to me to be nonsense. I know a lot about music; and so far I've always been able to distinguish 100% of computer-generated musical snippets from genuine classical snippets. And specifically, the key difference is exactly what is claimed by the second group -- that computer-generated melodies are just piles of similar musical ideas mashed together, without any apparent intent or direction. One of the claims of skeptics of art is that there really is nothing there, and that all the "art critics" are just doing a wetware version of GPT-2. If someone trained in art can really distinguish a cubist painting with artistic intent from one generated with this neural net, then it's 1) proof that there really is something there, and 2) it's maybe worth learning about.
ricg 7y ago
What is the input to produce one of these images (aside from the pre-trained model)? Is it a random number or another image or something else? Let's say you wanted to re-render the exact same image given the same state of your pre-trained model, what information would you use here?
- valentinvieriu 7y ago
  Yes there is an initial seed that it's needed, and it's baked in the name of the file. So if in the future I'll find a way to improve the quality, you can get the same result by passing in the seed

Rochus 7y ago

Great idea. Looks very convincing and aesthetic to me, but I am not an art expert. But I do know a lot about music and I am not yet convinced of the current offers of AI in this regard. So it would be very interesting to know how art experts react to these paintings.

valentinvieriu 7y ago
The challenge is that the Latent Space ( the space of all the art pieces of this model ) is so HUGE ( technically is infinite ) that there could be masterpieces sitting there undiscovered. I was aiming to create an interface to allow for crowd sourcing this process of finding those masterpieces. Hope the ui and and easy to pick some favorite process will help
- pookeh 7y ago
  Or... train AI to pick out the masterpieces...and loop.
  - joncrane 7y ago
    Well people have to create the training dataset so we're on that path, should the author choose to continue on it.
  - valentinvieriu 7y ago
    Yep. Please click on the favorite button :) so I can keep the favorites
tkgally 7y ago
I'm not an art expert or an artist, but I spent a lot of time in art galleries and museums forty years ago looking closely at and thinking about abstract art. Some of the pieces here strike me as remarkably good and interesting to look at. If they had been implemented in oils rather than pixels, they would not seem out of place on museum walls.
- valentinvieriu 7y ago
  That would be the next step to close the circle https://twitter.com/sougwen/status/1218672595350032385/photo/2 https://twitter.com/sougwen/status/1218672595350032385/photo...

adzm 7y ago

Hey this is an awesome project with really cool results. I think it can be grouped with "found art" conceptually. Several of the generated pieces are really quite interesting, though at some point the styles seem a bit repetitive, though I imagine that's simply due to training on cubism.

yantrams 7y ago

Very cool. Some of the results reminded me of Max Ernst’s frottage works and futurist compositions. If you are interested in exploring this with other curated collections, reach out to me. I have a MOMA collection of about 10k images.

valentinvieriu 7y ago
Would really appreciate it! Please connect with me on twitter @valentinvieriu

rfeague 7y ago

I think you have an opportunity here --- I found myself wondering how much it would cost to get a nice-quality print on canvas or metal. Something I could hang in my office. They look that good. Are they (or could they be) generated in sufficiently high resolution for a large format print?

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
Working in an office decorated by a bot is the most demoralizing experience I could imagine. I would probably go into an existential rage and start breaking things until someone more physically powerful came and subdued me.
- thomasahle 7y ago
  Sure, once those things are common place it'll be dystopian; but for now it's just a fun conversation starter.
- bobly_today 7y ago
  Such as a security bot?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- willvarfar 7y ago
  Is your problem that you know its bot-generated, or that you think there's some flaw in the pictures? What if you didn't know that the painting was the work of a bot? What if it was just some abstract painting that someone took enough fancy to to pay to have put on a canvas? Personally, I couldn't really tell them from the human-generated wikiart pictures that seeded the algorithm. Those human-generated pieces didn't speak to me either. I'd love to see the algorithm work on some other art style seeds.
  - jsaldes 7y ago

Jupe 7y ago

Fascinating stuff. Who decides what gets shared? Are you posting everything, or do you curate the results of the algorithm?

kernelsanderz 7y ago

Really great project. I'm interested in how you've implemented the back-end? How did you productionize the GAN model? Or did you just pregenerate 1000 images? (ie. are the images generated on-demand?)

valentinvieriu 7y ago
So the backend is simple, i've chosen to pregenerate 1 mil images at the beginning so it gives you some idea of diversity. I"ve tried to generate them realtime, but my server would have not survived the hackernews popularity today. The gan model is created by me, see in the comments above. I'm planning on bringing up new images on a daily timeframe, keep the one that people choose as favorites and delete the ones that were not popular

dimitry12 7y ago

I would love to see TensorBoard learning curves from your experiment: score/real and score/fake. I've tried fine-tuning FFHQ-model before and training was not progressing as I expected it to.

iandanforth 7y ago

Do neural painter next! https://github.com/reiinakano/neural-painters-pytorch https://github.com/reiinakano/neural-painters-pytorch

valentinvieriu 7y ago
Interesting idea. I will give it a try to see what is the output. I was looking for something in this direction to make the brush feel more appealing. Thank you

willvarfar 7y ago

Why cubist? Is it that that's the style of art you like? Or that you found to work best? It would be really interesting to see the kind of images generated when its trained with other styles.

valentinvieriu 7y ago
I have other styles too, and I'm planning on exchanging the AI on a regular basis. This was the one that I've personally liked the most. It was also the one that required the least training. I only have a 2080ti, and those models are quite hard to train. If you have recognisable shapes ore faces, you can quickly create some very disgusting art pieces that will make people sick. At this moment abstract seems to be the best solution.

joantune 7y ago

This is awesome! I would hook this up with Shopify and one of those printing and shipping services and see where that leads you. I'm a Shopify expert, already did that for customers, if you need advice let me know

gwd 7y ago

What I think would be interesting would be to add a human discriminator test: Can you tell genuine cubist art from computer-generated cubist art?

tartoran 7y ago
What would the point of that be may I ask? Something to do with a Turing like test? Lets not forget that the would be cubist model is actually fed tons of cubist images and all it does is regurgitating that back. Art done by people is somewhat similar but it does take place in a context that which AI could not yet understand.
- gwd 7y ago
  Well, I'm personally curious. When I looked through this thread several hours ago, there seemed to be two very distinct camps: "This is really cool you should see if you can sell these", and "This is just random stuff mashed together; there's clearly no artistic intent". The first group, it seems, sees no "artistic intent" in real cubist art, and so sees no difference; the second claims to be able to see real "artistic intent" in real art, and to note its absence here. I have to admit I'm rather in the first camp. I have spent time in art galleries, but not a huge amount; I have opinions about art, but 90% of what I hear said about paintings seems to me to be nonsense. I know a lot about music; and so far I've always been able to distinguish 100% of computer-generated musical snippets from genuine classical snippets. And specifically, the key difference is exactly what is claimed by the second group -- that computer-generated melodies are just piles of similar musical ideas mashed together, without any apparent intent or direction. One of the claims of skeptics of art is that there really is nothing there, and that all the "art critics" are just doing a wetware version of GPT-2. If someone trained in art can really distinguish a cubist painting with artistic intent from one generated with this neural net, then it's 1) proof that there really is something there, and 2) it's maybe worth learning about.

ricg 7y ago

What is the input to produce one of these images (aside from the pre-trained model)? Is it a random number or another image or something else? Let's say you wanted to re-render the exact same image given the same state of your pre-trained model, what information would you use here?

valentinvieriu 7y ago
Yes there is an initial seed that it's needed, and it's baked in the name of the file. So if in the future I'll find a way to improve the quality, you can get the same result by passing in the seed